Photographs

June 07, 2011

It turns out that seeing people appreciate your creative output is what it’s all about, after all.

Control was a show I collaborated on with nine other photographers from the North of England. It ran for three weeks as part of the Look2011 photography festival in Liverpool, which runs until the end of June 2011.

My day job involves some event management and exhibition organisation for artists, but in that role I’m very much just the facilitator: I do all the work to make it happen and then I fade into the background. This time, though, it’s been about the whole team pulling together to deliver the project, and the whole team taking the praise.

Hearing about the trials and tribulations of some of the other groups working under the Redeye Lightbox scheme, it quickly became apparent that our group were working very well together – the occasional cooler email was as far as we fell out during the eight months leading up to the show.

One feeling that everyone seemed to share was that because sorting out our venue (a found space near the NOVAS centre) took so long, the process became much more about exhibition management than about our individual projects and how they worked together. The photography felt, at points, like an afterthought.

We’ll be taking the show, in a slightly stripped-down form, to London for PhotoMonth this autumn, which means the work gets more exposure as part of a more well-established event, so we’re starting the preparations for that, and in the mean time I plan to spend more time exploring my theme of silence as a form of control.

It feels as if I’ve taken that first step, and found the path to be less the quicksand that I’d convinced myself of, and more firm ground. I feel like a contender again.